Batman: One Pixel Smile
by iammemyself
Summary: Title courtesy of @hermannco of Tumblr. Synopsis: Sometimes, on very rare occasions, Jonathan Crane has a good day.


'One Pixel Smile'

Title courtesy of hermannco

Synopsis: Sometimes, on very rare occasions, Jonathan Crane has a good day.

It was a nice day out. There were just enough clouds to keep it from being too hot, the sun still close enough to prevent the autumn air from being too cool. The leaves littering the cracked sidewalk were a gradient from lemony yellow to dark crimson, the season's fashions were beginning to reveal themselves in the form of college students wrapped in trendy sweaters, and there was an air of good cheer pervading the storied campus. It was, by all accounts, a precious and rare beautiful day.

At least, that's what he had been told.

Several people, still hell-bent on being annoyingly friendly, had mentioned this to him as he'd made his way as briskly as possible down the hallways that were always choked with students who never seemed to find anyplace else to go. They had classrooms. They had acre upon acre of manicured lawn. They had their doubtlessly ill-kempt dormitories, for heaven's sake. But they insisted on congregating in the hallways, chitchatting next to their lockers and spreading the entire contents of their backpacks across the scuffed linoleum as though they were moving in for the next several weeks.

He just wanted to get to his office in a timely manner _once._ Just _once_. Was that _really_ too much to ask? Was it?

And so by the time he'd gotten down to it, and a third member of faculty had cheerfully informed him of the weather as though he had not _walked_ here through the stuff, he could not have cared less about what the world beyond the walls of his office looked like. In fact, he would have told them that – told them with impunity, 'I don't care' – except that he didn't care enough to do so. What was the big deal with the weather, anyway? It was always like this. Everyone commented on it every single day, as though the fact that it changed from literally minute to minute was _novel_. What a trite and boring way to make conversation. Conversation that he never, ever entertained and never, ever cared about.

And so, as usual, he was not in the best of moods when he finally was able to insert the key into his office door and enter the dim room. Where there was no sun, and no cool air, and no loafing adolescents. There wasn't much of anything in there, other than a great quantity of books. To go along with the books was quite a lot of papers, containing the notes he had taken while reading said books, stacked… well, anywhere he'd left them, really. He wasn't too particular on notes he wasn't using. He always took down information while he was reading, but he only kept track of those about certain things pertaining to his own research. Note-taking was more a method to aid his retention than anything else. And really, why bother reading something you don't want to remember?

He sat down at his desk and opened the briefcase he brought his most important work to and from the university from every day. He had been asked several times why he bothered, considering he _did_ lock his office door every night, but he would have thought the answer obvious. Since when had a cursory lock ever kept anyone of intent from breaching an entryway? The lock on his office door was probably cheaper than the one back at the room he rented, and that was saying something. The briefcase wasn't the sturdiest, and he really needed to look into getting a new one, but it was holding up for now. Mostly because it was very difficult to find a functioning suitcase at the thrift store. He avoided purchasing new items wherever possible, and ended up frequenting such establishments whenever needed. Which was usually when he wanted to purchase more books. They were often found there both in decent condition and cheap. None of that gouging that went on at the used bookstore across the street from his living space. On occasion he did have to venture in there, but he never liked it and he always argued with the shopkeeper over the ridiculous price she was charging for a textbook that had been out of date for ten years. She always insisted that his wanting it justified the cost, which he would combat with the statement that it was ten years out of date and he only wanted to compare it to the previous edition, which was waiting patiently for him to read it back at home. She never budged on it and neither did he, and all that ever happened was that he angrily put the thing back where he'd found it and removed himself from the premises, hoping that today the library had a new batch of discards and _that book_ would be in it because he'd be _damned_ if he paid that much for it…

He was able to work quietly for a while. Sort of, anyway, considering the students in the hallway outside were always talking about how terribly they were failing their classes and what lewd escapades they were planning for that night in such a volume that they may as well have been sitting in his office relating all of it to him personally. And that had been the case on several occasions, where students thought that heartfelt renderings of their personal problems would really cause him to care enough to offer them an extension on a paper they had wilfully left to the last minute. He never did. He only offered extensions for one circumstance and one circumstance only, and no one had brought it up as yet. He hoped they never did, either, because once he granted it suddenly everyone would come to his office with the same excuse, and he just did not have the _time_ to verify whether or not their doctor's notes were valid or just a template stolen from some website with a hastily scrawled, left-handed signature at the bottom. Though to be fair, he usually could distinguish faked doctor's handwriting from the real thing. Takes one to know one, after all.

That thought was almost amusing. Almost.

Once he had gotten the outline of his next paper outlined the way he had envisioned, he opened the middle drawer on the desk and removed the ancient laptop the university had insisted he needed. He took great pleasure in using the computer for one thing and one thing only: deleting emails.

For some reason, the students at the university believed that, if they sent him one of these digital letters, he would answer it. He never had and he fully intended never, ever to do so. The only emails he ever wrote a reply to were faculty emails discussing his requests for funding. Those were important. The rest of the junk that ended up in his account… not so much. If a student could not be bothered to come and talk to him in person, he could not be bothered to give their hastily written email any attention.

It took about five minutes for the computer to arrange itself, during which time he was able to read an entire page of the text he was working through. That was one of the reasons he hated computers. They were so incredibly _slow_. He spent so much time waiting for the damn thing to do whatever it was that went on in there that he just would have preferred not to bother. But computers were the future, or something, and so he was forced to use it.

It took another five minutes for the browser to load and open up his virtual inbox – which he much despised compared to his _physical_ inbox, which was right now full of papers he really did not have any desire to grade – and inside of it were twenty or so unread emails. He pushed aside his book so as to move the computer closer and squinted at the screen. He'd always felt it was too bright but had no idea how to do anything about that, if anything indeed could be done.

The first email read,

 _Dr Crane, what chapters did you ask us to have read for tomorrow's lecture? I lost the syllabus._

That was not his problem in the least. Students needed to learn how to better keep track of important papers. How else would they survive come tax time? Delete.

 _Dr Crane, I was sitting in the back of the lecture hall and missed about half of what you said. Would you mind handing out summaries for those of us without the ears of a well-trained dog?_

Had they missed what he said because they were sleeping? That was usually the reason. And he would have deleted it just for that, only they had also added in passive-aggression as though they thought he were stupid and would not notice. He made a note of their name for future reference. Delete.

 _Congratulations, you have won! Click here to claim your prize of ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Act quickly, you have twenty-four hours to claim!_

God, he wished. And honestly, he had clicked on one of those emails before, out of curiosity. But it had caused some mad rush of viruses to descend upon the computer, apparently, which had completely ruined everything on it, and he had been given a lecture on not clicking suspicious links in emails from senders he didn't know. He hadn't appreciated that and had resolved to hate computers even more for putting him through it. Delete.

 _If you don't stop kicking the back of my chair in chem, I will go to your house and tell your sister what you did with her birthday present. I mean it. It's not as funny as you think it is._

He toyed with answering that one, but ultimately decided he didn't have the inclination to deal with it no matter how amusing the fallout would be. Perhaps next time. Delete.

Once he'd made his way through those it was time for lunch, which he was somewhat pleased to note, as he had forgotten to drink the coffee he'd brought from home and now he had a convenient excuse to go and microwave it in the cafeteria. He preferred to do it there, and not in any of the faculty rooms; the students, while pesky, did not try to gossip with him. He was not interested in gossip. He was here to work. He was beginning to think he could count on one hand the number of people who did that.

He locked his office on the way out and began the trip to the cafeteria, which was not any more fun than the walk to his office had been in the first place. In fact, it was worse, because the students were even _more_ inclined to laze about on the floor at lunch than they were at any other time.

Once he got there he had to get into the line to use the microwave, which was bothersome, but not nearly as much as it would have been to have to ignore everyone in one of the faculty rooms. The bulk of the student body didn't know who he was, and on the rare occasions someone did he often just glared at them and they walked away. If he was on lunch, he was on lunch. He wasn't going to take the ridiculous inquiries of students who wouldn't read their textbooks.

Hm. Speaking of textbooks… someone had left the one he had been trying to find on top of the microwave. They would doubtless be coming back for it, since textbooks _were_ expensive, but… perhaps they wouldn't be. Perhaps he could just… provide it a new home. He was well aware that text was not on any syllabus anyway and the student probably just could not be bothered to get the updated edition. Well, they would have to do so now…

He did not at all look out of place walking down the halls with a random text pinched against his ribs, so no one stopped to ask why he was carrying a book a decade out of date around. He wondered if he should go to the bookstore and make a point of showing the woman who ran the place that he had acquired his desired book, and for free, no less! but if he was going to do that he was going to need a bit more of a plan to go off. Just going somewhere to gloat without an end goal in mind was tacky. If he was going to rub it in her face that he hadn't had to pay her stupid price for this ancient book, he was going to make it meaningful.

He had accidentally left the laptop on when he left the room and when he sat down with his book and his coffee he noticed he had another email. He was initially going to ignore it – after all, he had gotten his text and his coffee and his mood was improved already – until he saw the subject line of the message:

 _Re: Approval for funding request._

Now that was even _better_ than finding the textbook! He smiled to himself, just a little. Just a little bit.

Perhaps it really _was_ a nice day, after all.


End file.
